In Search of…

The only time I ever found myself in Tonopah, I had everything I owned in the back of a Nissan Sentra. I was driving alone, in the dead of winter, past midnight. I had spent the day on a tricky journey from Portland, southeast through the icy Sierra Nevadas. Wiser drivers had foregone the route I took—mine being whatever looked good on my crumpled map. Before I knew what I had done, I was in a no-turning-back land of icy, nearly abandoned two-lane roads through snowy mountains with which I was completely unfamiliar.

Several times I rolled down my windows just to hear my tires softly crunch the ice, to feel the sting of cold air, smell the mix of wet woods and my screwy catalytic converter. A couple of times the Sentra slid toward the shoulder, giving me flash-forwards of a harrowing hike out of the wilderness with my toes breaking off. But fear gave way to adrenaline, to absurd joy, to a feeling of unbelievable freedom. Here was the power of nature and vehicle and foolish youth on display in all its glory: I remember thinking, This is awesome. I was 22.

I was leaving Portland and going to back to Tucson, for a relationship this time, but I was always leaving somewhere and going somewhere else for some reason in those years.

I knew nothing of Nevada then. And shortly after leaving the Sierra Nevadas and coming through Reno well after sunset, into a great expanse of dark nothingness, I wished only that my car would go faster. I ground the pedal into the floorboard, but the needle danced there just above 100. I looked out the windshield at the blackness wondering if, in fact, I was getting anywhere, or if I had slipped into some Bermuda Triangle of road trips, never to be seen again. It was a metaphor for my life, although I didn't see it that way then.

By the time I saw a sign for a place called Tonopah, my eyelids were hanging. I had chased into static every last radio station and eaten so many salted-in-the-shell sunflower seeds that my lips were swollen. It was almost 2 a.m. and I was about ready to pull over and sleep upright. But Tonopah glowed heroically in the near distance. I bet that's a sentence you never thought you'd read. I decided I would stay there, hotel or no hotel.

As the lights of the small mining town grew, I felt a burgeoning sense of independence, of celebration. I pulled into the first roadside motel, rang the bell and was greeted by an old man. He swiftly took my cash—I think it was $23 with tax—and gave me a key. The parking lot was silent and nearly empty. I got my shoulder bag and hoofed up the stairs to room 204. Inside, I found a droopy bed and nightstand, all covered with about a quarter-inch of dust, as if no one had been in here for years. No matter. I was never happier to be in a motel room. It was a place to sleep before getting back on the road. I was never happier to be on the road.

Great chunks of life are accurately if tritely summed up as road trips. There's a reason that writers from Walt Whitman to Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway to Hunter S. Thompson wrote about the roads, often as metaphors for life: It's hard not to.

For many people, and certainly for me, the early twenties in particular were a reckless road trip to nowhere in particular. They were years when I was always trying to get somewhere, although I had no idea where I needed to be. And the fact that those years were also literally crisscrossed with actual road trips is an indication that trite metaphors are, sometimes regrettably, based in truth.

My own treks were, however, motivated by bursts of genius. Frequently this genius put me on the road pointing toward a thousand miles of mysteries with very little money and no spare tire. Most of the time I traveled in a car that had never had an oil change, ever. I had discovered my calling—driving around—and was bolstered by a world full of kindred spirits whom I found waiting out their post-midlife years in dark taverns. We shared beer and unemployment and lies and a comfortable degree of anonymity. I fancied myself emancipated from the rush-hour life I was supposed to be building.

I also fell for the language of the roads, the sights and sounds: The hum of the wind—and the bugs—hitting my car. The stereo. The monstrous RV from Iowa lollygagging in the fast lane, the speedster sneaking up on the right. Tumbleweeds. Joshua Trees. Corn fields. Blowing dust. Little towns anchored by a Chevron and a church, a couple of houses and trailers. Historical markers, beef jerky stands and truck stops. The big rigs. The rip-off attractions: tallest thermometer, steepest roller coaster, real frozen cave man! The roadside motels: color TV and air conditioning in every room! Diner food. Fast food. Snack food. Hitchhikers, cattle crossings, rain storms, the smell of burning oil.

Although the car and roads were spiritual fixes in their own right, the salve to the restless, directionless condition of my life, the miracles (or catastrophes, depending on your perspective), occurred most frequently with the people on the trip:

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Somewhere in the Sonoran Desert near Tucson: I've wrecked. I wake up. It's night. A man in an abnormally large, vividly white cowboy hat is banging on the window. I'm in the driver's seat of a Buick Regal. In a ditch. He's saying, "Are you OK?" And it seems that there are windows, many, many windows, between us. We are in a vast desert. I get out. I can barely walk. He offers to drive me to civilization. I say yes. I get in his truck. I fall asleep.

The sun is rising, the man is shaking my shoulder, there's a truck stop ahead. He gives me a couple of bucks and change to make a phone call. I say, "Thanks." And he is gone. Later, I remember his hat as a halo.

•
Somewhere near Santa Fe: It's late and dark, and the tunes and dashboard lights are all that surround us, and the confessions come pouring out of the friend riding beside me. I feel like a priest in the dark confessional booth. Here, he can say it, to the driver, to the road, to the night, to the moment—where it will be free and then left behind, on mile marker 232, on a highway we'll forget about. Terrible stories flow out. He cries. It's not me but the road and the night and the car that comfort him, swaddle him, free him. Later, we stop for cigarettes, for Coke, for Atomic Fireball candies; we laugh, we fill up the tank, we get in, we sing songs for 200 miles.

•
Somewhere in or near that country south of the border: Some of us are drunk. Halfway to Mexico. Halfway into Mexico? Five of us piled in, I'm shotgun, we're singing Jimmy Buffet songs with absolutely no sense of irony. This car rocks. Over the river and through the sand. To Puerto Penasco—a rocky beach with fat shrimp and cheap tequila—we go. No one's really sure of the way. But we don't care. Is that a roadside machaca stand? Tengo hambre! Y quien tiene mas cerveza? Someone's lit a joint in the back. Someone else can't stop laughing. Our road turns to dirt, back to gravel, right to sketchy pavement—where the hell are we? There's a long-looking road that looks good, we decide. Take that one. May we never return.

By some force other than wisdom, we did return. And we went off on thousands of other roads invidually, made it through our early twenties, got shuffled into some sort of working life or another, and put our reckless wanderings on pause—some briefly, some more permanently.

I have never been back to Tonopah. The road seems long and unnecessary today. I suspect the motel wouldn't seem as simultaneously bad and beautiful as it did that night.

I hit the road less these days, lesser still alone. It happened gradually. It's not that a person is just suddenly, imperturbably settled when she hits 30 or 40 or even 60 for that matter. My life still tends to have an unsettled quality to it that I suspect will still be there on the day I die.

But there have been so many road trips now. After a certain amount of time, your left brain and your sense of time-management—who has time for road trips?—cause you to suspect that the car, the road, never get you anywhere, really. It's the escapist's conundrum, that old saw: Wherever you go, there you are.

Still, once in a while, there's nothing else you can do. If you're a road-tripper, the way that others are addictive shoppers or gamblers or TV watchers or alcoholics or drug addicts, sometimes the urge to go is too big to fight. You just have to hit the road. For me, it usually happens spontaneously, and I end up on Mt. Charleston without a coat or in Death Valley without water or walking shoes. It's more than a habit, it's a directive. I wouldn't be surprised if I end up in an RV someday, hogging the left lane while microwaving a pot roast in back, driving around just because I've got days left to do so.